Revision Isn't Just For Novels

...it's for plans, too.

So my late but great summer writing plan didn't exactly go as planned, so I've revised my goals to adjust to the onset of school.

First things first: Tornado C. Since I'm doing it with One Year Adventure Novel (albeit with a few adjustments), my mom and I are counting it as part of my language arts. Thus, I have a daily assignment – to write in Tornado C.

Since we were gone most of August, this week was my first week of the official school year. To balance out my pre-calc (insert shudder here) I've been working on Tornado C. I've hit 18,000 words just today and I hope to write more tonight.

And yes, my brevity is still feeling under the weather. I'm probably two thirds or three fifths of the way through chapter five (out of twenty-five outlined chapters). Chapter six is shaping up to be long, since it's the one-fourth milestone and contains a crucial turning point. The farther I get into the book, the longer it seems to get. It may even get as long as 100,000 words – by far the most massive thing I'll have ever written.

After school I'll have some spare time. I typically finish my homework somewhere between two and four in the afternoon, depending on how long I snoozed my alarm in the morning. The rainy season is still in full force here, so I'm spending a lot of my time indoors. That means I have plenty of times for writing; in the coming month, I'm hoping to work a lot on Tornado C and other projects.

However, there's two big problems here. First, since we do a lot of schoolwork on the computers, their batteries are usually dead by mid-afternoon. Why not recharge? Well, we don't turn on our generator until seven o'clock PM on most days, which means that we have no electricity during the day.

The second problem is that I arrived back from America to discover that my computer is pretty much fried. The keys don't work properly, probably because of the constant rain and humidity provided by the rainy season. Thus, that computer is as good as scrap now. (The day we left for America, however, I backed everything important up on an external hard drive, so I've lost nothing but some random pictures.)

These two elements are a big handicap to my writing, but I've been utilizing my mom's computer for the time being, and the arrangement is working well.

Further plans? Right now, I'm beginning to turn my attention to my Will Vullerman stories again. I hope that, after some rigorous rewriting and revision, I'll have those published as ebooks sometime in the next two months. (At LEAST before 2013. I hope. But sometimes these things take longer than you want them to.)

Before I publish them, however, I plan on offering these stories for free to all of my blog followers. I don't really like milking my blog followers for money, honestly. I'm aiming these stories more at the average Joe who happens to scroll by it while browsing Amazon, rather than making money off of family and friends.

When I publish my Will Vullerman stories, I'm planning on utilizing KDP Select. It's an Amazon program that lets my stories be available to borrow in the Kindle Lending Library, and also allows me to put my stories up for free for up to five days a month. Sounds good, right? It's free, but it does require one thing: exclusivity. That means these stories won't be available for Nook, iBooks, etc. (This means that I won't be able to give the file to anyone, since that would violate the KDP Select agreement. That's why I'll be offering my stories to you guys BEFORE I publish them.)

I didn't use the KDP Select route for The War Horn, though. Why do it now?

Well, honestly, my TWH sales through Smashwords (which distributes to Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, and others) have been next to nothing. Trading those meager sales for the opportunity to advertise my stories for free seems to be a good trade – for now. It's an experiment. If I do well with Will Vullerman, I may pull it off KDP Select and load it to Smashwords.

Depending on when I get my WV stories published, I've got more Will Vullerman stories brewing in my head that I want to write. One in particular has caught my attention: the tentative title is “Zero”. I'm having trouble keeping my self-control, though. I'm trying really hard not to write them before I get the others published. ;)

Oh, and by the way, I finally figured out, totally on accident, why I nicknamed my novel Tornado C. Today, I wrote this sentence: “A titanic beam of fire, wider than a man, hurtled down from the sky like a cyclone, and struck the ground with a thunderous crackle-BOOM.”

Trick word in that sentence is “cyclone”, or tornado. ;)

(And yes, that sentence needs lots of polishing, but you get my point.)

So what about you? How's school coming along? Have you written anything of note? Read anything good? Let me know. I always read your comments, even if I don't reply.